Andreessen was blunt: With a great market,
a company can handle a staff of half-wits
or jerks because “the team is remarkably
easy to upgrade on the fly.” What’s more,
he wrote, “the product doesn’t need to be
great; it just has to basically work.”
VCs had also soundly discredited pricing
as the key to success. (When a sector is indif-
ferent to the laws of supply and demand,
that is some serious irrational exuberance.)
“Innovation,” too, was yesterday’s news. Dis-
appointingly, for those of us who cottoned
to the folktale of a new economy driven by
brilliant little Edisons and Teslas in Everlane,
technological breakthroughs were, by 2015,
believed to be too easily copied. Instead,
deaths by achieving the desideratum to
end all desiderata: product/market fit.
PMF. Products were seen as placeholders
that were to be broken, iterated on, pivoted
from. By contrast, a nice loamy market,
primed, was a joy forever. The everything.
In the right market, anything—vanilla-
honey vape, ancient grains meal-delivery
service—can find purchase. Though not all
startups believed marketing was the sil-
ver bullet for success, the ones that came
to us seemed to think: If you build it, they
will come, and if they come, you will find
a way—even if far, far down the road—to
sell them mugs. Or memberships. Or ads,
or some freemium bunk.success lay in branding flourishes—Snapchat
ghosts, Instagram influencers, the massive
glass lantern that is Istanbul’s Apple store.
We in marketing also held tight to
Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success, named
for Andy Rachleff, another VC god who
cofounded the firm Benchmark that made a
mint betting on eBay, OpenTable, Snapchat,
Twitter, and Uber. Rachleff’s Law: The num-
ber one company killer is lack of market.
And so, flush off earlyish rounds of ven-
ture capital, startups paid us to identify,
reach, and soften up prospective consum-
ers, using an alchemy of surveys, intuition,
design, blue-sky ideation, typography,
ethnographies, direct email, advertising,
events, comms, logos, PR, stunts, and (in
theory) art, literature, and film. And of
course my specialty: decks. These are the
sententious keynote presentations, used to
dazzle investors or recruit employees, that
try to get a startup to seem like a holy mis-
sion. In my decks, I liked to associate things
like payment software and organic-snack
subscription boxes with such universally
admired ideas as Apple, love, or Banksy.
We marketing teams came to believe we
alone could save startups from untimely
The problem was the usual. We were
bullish for too long. As we watched the big
agencies, we saw that even the best mar-
keting couldn’t quite compensate for a cer-
tain miniature blood test that didn’t work.
Nor, at another agency, could Instagram
influencers turn disaster-relief tents into
a sexy island bacchanal worthy of Kendall
Jenner. From our firm’s gleaming digs, we
shuddered as we watched the first cracks in
the facade of Theranos. Later, other offer-
ings with marvelous marketing—Jawbone,
Hampton Creek (Just Mayo), and Airware—
burned through millions of dollars trying
to get the optics right on products, services,
or business models that were, yeah, janky.
Moreover, when it came right down to
it, staffing did matter, especially because
teams underperformed when mismanaged
by bumptious founders like Uber’s Travis
Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann.
Teams willing to work with volatile, arro-
gant management weren’t so “remarkably
easy to upgrade on the fly,” as Andreessen
had once led investors to believe; word gets
around about people like Kalanick and Neu-
mann. And then, after shake-ups like the
ones at Uber and WeWork, startups gen-users: The market (users) is the product (the
network). So by acquiring users with mar-
keting you were simultaneously building
your product. VCs used to love the idea of a
young big shot who saw a vast market that
the old didn’t: the diary writers who would
contribute to Tumblr. The lonely hearts that
became Facebook. Investors also swooned
at the idea of using relatively cheap market-
ing magic to get millions of users hooked on
something and then cashing in.
The investors cashed in. But social media
companies had to turn into galactic data
Hoovers to become profitable, and the naive
hope that one day startups could trade on
the users, accounts, or subscriptions they’d
acquired meant that the early years of a
company were expected to be devoted to
UA. It’s not that that logic didn’t hold up; it’s
that users used to come cheap to divey, bare-
bones joints like Twitter, and they’d stick by
glitches and unpopular updates because
they had made them their own and had
nowhere else to go. Now users cost much
more to court—have you seen the freebies
offered at companies like the home-products
club Grove Collaborative?!—and with too
many apps already on their phone, they enterI liked to associate things like payment software and
organic-snack subscription boxes with such universally
admired ideas as Apple, love, or Banksy.
erally seem more shaken than revitalized.
Four years ago, when companies had pro-
found problems with their models, leader-
ship, or products, marketing came to be
seen as not just a way to lipstick pigs but as
a way to block and tackle regulation, to keep
secrets, to shut out anyone who wanted to
so much as see the product.
So marketing went from the only solution
to the smoke that suggested fire that sug-
gested indictments. To be fair, at the advent
of the social networks, VCs could be for-
given for thinking that marketing was the
whole game. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat,
Pinterest, and Instagram were acquiring
users to make a network and attract more